Migrating Lotus Notes applications to SharePoint

The most common reason why companies migrate away from Lotus Notes is to replace the e-mail infrastructure, which is often not up to users’ expectations. In the majority of these cases ...

Lotus Notes has been on the market since 1989, and has remained until now a part of the IT ecosystems of many companies. In the recent years, however, there has been a significant movement away from Lotus Notes to more modern solutions than IBM’s aging product.

The most common reason why companies migrate away from Lotus Notes is to replace the e-mail infrastructure, which is often not up to users’ expectations. In the majority of these cases, organizations decide to make the transition to Microsoft Exchange, since it is the market leader for corporate users.

Migration of e-mail services and basic features is not typically the end of the migration. For many years, Lotus Notes has been widely used to deliver workflow-based applications for many companies. To prevent a situation where Lotus Notes and SharePoint ecosystems are in place, organizations have decided to migrate workflow-based applications to SharePoint as well.

Unlike a simple e-mail migration, there is no tool on the market that is capable of automatically migrating complex applications into SharePoint environment. To avoid the .NET coding required to extend the initial capabilities of SharePoint, third-party solutions are often chosen, providing extensive workflow and forms capabilities. This allows users to re-create their business applications in a low-code manner, which is significantly easier and quicker compared to custom coding.